Test of The Hallows
by Er1danu5
Summary: Possession of The Deathly Hallows was just the first test. Can Harry survive being reborn into another world on the brink of turmoil? (EWE, possible Slash, MasterofDeath!Harry)


HP X MULTI

Death didn't want him. It never wanted him. Not at 13 months, not at 17 years, and certainly not now.

The wizarding world was not the only plane that labeled him as The Chosen One. Even Reapers knew not to touch him, their incorporeal flesh blistered in his very presence. Only the Corrupted, rotting creatures called Dementors by the wizarding race, were mindless enough to try. Hellhounds and Grims skulked unseen in the shadows behind him not as omens but as a veritable army of vicious guardians. He was their charge from birth, their Master by age 17, and now at the age of 164 they were beginning to be his silent lone companions.

Harry Potter had married Ginny Weasley during the Great Rebirth following the end of the Second Wizarding War, but bore no children. Ginny had loved Harry as the boy hero from her childhood stories and he had loved her without end until her final days at age 127. Harry's best friends Ron and Hermione had married, pursued and left lasting marks in magical law enforcement and creature rights respectively. They had three children who had grown up knowing nothing but peace and ran after their dreams fearlessly, surrounded by endless support and love. His friends passed together, just the year prior, their children returning from across the globe to pay their respects before returning to their own families and careers. Teddy Lupin took after his parents, despite never knowing them, a confident but clumsy metamorphagus and and devoted advocate working under, and eventually preceding, Hermione Granger as Head Commissioner of Creature Affairs for the DMLE. He married his childhood crush, a Ravenclaw with a sharp sense of humor and the kindest soul Harry had met since meeting Molly Weasley. But that was the point wasn't it? War times were over, peace had settled, and the world moved on.

Possessing all three Hallows, despite purposely loosing one and destroying another, had made him The Master of Death. Not an un-aging scion of power, just a man still able to grow old with his companions, but impenetrable to illness and unwelcome in DEath's realm.

Death is the oldest sentient power to exist, timeless in its age and bowing to no one. Being Master is to be enraptured, surrounded, to grow in knowledge and understanding of the ultimate and inevitable darkness that ends all life. To Master death, is to know death, the Hallows were only a key, a rite of passage to sacred knowledge. But to find all three is not the test, nor is it the key. The test is the act of letting go of the desire to wallow in ones loss, to shed the ability to survive unseen and live in the open, to break the lust for power with the desire to be a companion instead of a ruler. These elements are tools, used to thin the heard of those who are consumed by grief, trapped in fear, and power hungry to the point of their own demise. Initiates are chosen, a number in every generation, thinned to one soul ever millennia who will rise before they fall, loose everything before they are acknowledged, and learn to whisper through the planes of existence as a conduit of pure understanding, a Knight, a Hand, a Prince of the darkness living in the light.

Harry James Potter was marked before he was born, a mark on his soul and not his skin. One of thousands but the only to survive the trials. He had never begged for death, only accepted it, and even now with nothing but shadows for company, face caressed with deep lines, and hair gone white with age - he only asks what the next adventure may hold.

Rebirth is a messy affair, a host must be carefully chosen from an existing but fundamentally different plane of existence from the reborn. They must be childless, distressed over the perceived loss of family, nurturing, from a race that highly values offspring, and powerful in mind, body, and soul. The reborn must be protected at all cost and raised strong, fortified against peril but not blind to it's devastation. The plane itself must be on the crux of turmoil, the reborn should only know peace and security as an end result born from the darkness of destruction. The reborn is inherently neutral in power but has the agency to choose a side within the conflict of their own free will. If they should break the unspoken expectations set forth by their original life and test of The Hallows they will fail, and be swallowed by death to never be reborn again,

And so it was, that on the evening of September 3, 2147 Harry Potter fell asleep in his home outside of Hogsmead, just in sight of the first place he called home, and disappeared from the wizarding world without so much as a note or even a lingering magical signature.


End file.
